Note: /r/startups recommended I cross post this here. With Mod approval I am posting so you can experience the before and after.
T-Minus 10 hours to my Kickstarter Launch, I have my launch checklist built, my emails prepared, ads ready to be enabled and friends and family ready to pledge. There is more I can do, but I no longer have the energy as I sit here waiting for the inevitable conclusion to a year’s worth of work.
Within 36 hours we will all know if my efforts were worth it, or if I will fail. Here is how I created an outdoor backpacking product and prepared for my Kickstarter.
The product is a new innovative backpacking pillow. Decision: focus on a key market, in this case, backpackers. When you see text like this, it is meant to highlight that I had a key decision to make. Sometimes I simply had to make make a choice sometimes I had evidence it is hard to know if it was right or now. In this case, I made the decision because the PackPillow can be used for travel, general hiking and even general day use ( I brought it to a pool party recently and someone asked to use it while laying near a pool). So why did I decide to focus so much on backpacking… well because experts always say one should focus on a key market. It was a hard decision but I made it and moved on.
The first step was a prototype, and since it was a pillow, I could figure out how to sew it. As you can imagine I bought a $125 sewing machine and went to work. The first version sucked, but it was better than any pillow I ever used backpacking in my unbiased opinion. After about 4 prototypes I realized that I I was out of my league, so to upwork I went.
I have used upwork in the past for my other failed business attempts. My approach is to reach out to as many people as possible with the skillset I need, choose the top 3 and give them all the same small project and decide which one produces the best results. Well, trying to find someone with outdoor gear design, tent design, or anything related to sewing was harder than expected. I found two people, paid them each $100 and the results were mixed. One of them produced a great Tech Spec (the file that goes to the manufacturer) and the other produced a good prototype. Neither of them produces both pieces that were good. Ugh, in the end, I went with the one that made the better Tech Spec. Total cost of first Tech Spec $560
Decision: Manufacturer in China. I found a manufacturer, I went to Alibaba found manufacturers and choose the best one. If you want to know why I did not go with the US, it is simple… they suck. Seriously US manufacturing is horrible. They have terrible websites, they did not respond and they always said they could not make it. I reached out to over 100 US manufacturers over the past year, not a single one said they would work with me on getting it made. I only had to reach out to 10 manufacturers in China, and 9 of they said they could work with me.
Each sample from the manufacturer of choice cost me about $100. Yes, it was frustrating that they would make simple mistakes and took longer than desired, but over time we have a solution and the end result is great. Total cost: $670
Now let me switch to marketing, while I was producing the PackPillow I also worked on a website and advertising to see what results I could get. Decision: I use Wix and will sell with Shopify after the campaign. I started with Shopify simply because they are the gold standard when it comes to e-commerce and integrations. However, I was spending too much time designing my single page lead capture setup and decided to go with Wix as I could design much faster and move on. I am not an expert at web design but let me keep it simple for you. You don’t need to hire anyone so early in the process. If you suck at design, then just take one of the example layouts and change none of the designs. Don’t even change text size unless you have too.
I started with Google ads and Facebook ads. Within 2 weeks Google blocked my ads because my website was not valuable enough. It did not have any product pictures and a lot of the design was kept hidden so I see why they did that. Facebook let me run ads for months, which was great! I would use stock images from the internet, makeup text and run the ads with a $5/day budget. After a few days, I could see how well the ad performed. I was really lucky as Facebook released Lead Ads about 6 months ago, which was perfect for my needs. I could capture leads for the email list, and the conversion rate was high because the info was pre-filled out for the person on Facebook, they just had to click submit. In the end, my average cost-per-lead on Facebook was about $1.30.
This is one of the hard parts… to this day, I have no idea if this was a good idea or bad. I only knew it was a good price compared to what other company would pay. I had no idea how many of these people will buy and that is scary. Because in the end, I spent $2,000 on Facebook lead ads, to build my 1,800 person email list.
Quick Tip: If you pay for Facebook ads using Zapier to sync the leads from Facebook to your email system is a must. I chose MailChimp for email.
Decision: Spend half of my budget on marketing I have failed in my past businesses and there are always many reasons why, but I know my weakness is in selling and marketing. Some key advice: It is important to know what you are bad at and to focus on doing those activities the most. It is so easy to spend hours on website and product design, it is hard to spend 15 min selling.
I hit the point where I had my first Prototype that was respectable. And one of my friends bought it from me for $20 (It cost me $100 for the sample.. but oh well). Decision: I chose to launch the Kickstarter in May of 2017 and made this decision about 4 months ago. What brilliant method did I use, well as many successful business people will say if you are not embarrassed by your first version when you launched too late… so I was already too late. I also launched in May because it is a good start to the backpacking season and I wanted to hit my market when they were planning trips and buying new gear for the season. One of the downfalls of my plan is that they will not actually get a PackPillow until after the season is over as I expect it to take 4 months to deliver.
Setting a date was probably the best decision I ever made. I now had to think about how everything would work out. I built a reverse timeline to execute against and started working. I needed new samples so I can get pictures. I needed to make the PackPillow product video so I needed to make scripts, higher videographers, models, locations, OMFG was it a lot of work.
Decision: I chose to spend $3,000 on a video and you can see the results here http://ift.tt/2p0ujad. I had a script built, reached out to several companies, and settled on one that showed me previous work that I liked and was low cost as possible. Warning, many companies will hold onto IP rights for their work, which I think is crazy. But for some reason, it is the law, so I highly recommend you avoid any company that uses that practice. I also hired local college students to be the models. Two key mistakes I made with the video. First, I did not ask what equipment they used, as a result, I got 1080p. In my opinion, if you are a video professional your equipment should be nothing less than 4k at this point. The other mistake was the model’s attire, I should have focused more on their attire.
One more piece of advice, when you spend less on a video you need to do more. I spend a lot of time finding locations to film and I might have technically broken the law with one of my locations. It is hard to find a location I ended up using Airbnb and paid $120 for one of the locations.
Building the Kickstarter page was a ton of work. Each image, each GIF, and each piece of text needed to be specially designed for Kickstarter, as Kickstarter has an odd 680-pixel width, and for a good look, you want it to fit just perfectly. Also, I hate GIFs, but they are needed to use some of the features of the PackPillow. If you don’t know already GIFs are always huge files, even you see on the Kickstarter page, are the lowest resolution as I could reasonably post and short as reasonably possible and each one is larger than 4 MB. That is too much for people to download on a web page.
Advice: choose your images, and GIFs wisely as it will affect the page load time of your Kickstarter and will cause you to lose backers if the files are too large.
Decision: Kickstarter rewards. This was hard, as most campaigns seem to have early bird discounts, stretch goals and, a $1 tier. I choose not to have those for several reasons. Stretch goals complicate the process to deliver on time. The PackPillow is 2 items, the pillow, and the strap. If I add a stretch goal to add color, then I now have 4 items to manage. Hopefully, you can see how this scales fast and is a good reason why many campaigns fail to deliver on time. I chose not to do early bird to product the perceived value of PackPillow.
Friends and Family… One of the keys to a successful Kickstarter is to have a lot of traction on Day 1. To do that I begged friends and family to contribute on day one. Yes, it was awkward, but my wife and I called, asked for support and received many yeses and some nos.
Well, that is the high-level approach I took, and you will witness the success or failure over the next couple days.
Wish us luck!
/r/Entrepreneur addition: Now that the campaign has hit the goal. The target goal was set as low as possible, so at 100% we will lose money. The hope is that a people and press will be more excited to write about a successful campaign.
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